November 11, 2012

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+screenplay by Bob Goodman, based upon the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Klaus Jansondirected by Jay Oliva

by Jefferson Robbins There's
nothing left. Batman: Year One is so last year, The Killing
Joke basically got turned into The Dark Knight, and "Watchmen" has become both a big-movie flopola and a prequel
comics series. With Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1 on shelves
now and its concluding Part 2 due on direct-to-video disc this winter,
the DC Universe has basically wrung itself dry of compelling product from the
'80s comics revolution that it can repurpose into features and animated
editions. The bones remain for new stories, but the cost-benefit on original
work vs. revivified fan favourites ever tilts towards the latter. Those of us
who discovered or returned to superhero comics as a result of Frank Miller's and
Alan Moore's mature deconstructions are seeing their final fruits. The only
burning question is how many shmoes bought this package from Amazon thinking
they were getting The Dark Knight Rises in half of a special two-disc edition.

That said,
how is this cartoon take on Miller's most important Bat-work? The talented
political crank fast-forwarded and roughened the character in 1986, envisioning
a retired, post-traumatic Batman bursting back into battle against a new matrix
of familiar social disorders--apathy, random street violence, a youth gang on
the rise called the Mutants. The graphic novel crystallized the character as totemic,
not a man in a mask but a larger animating force that possesses Bruce Wayne
and, by extension, Gotham City. "The Dark Knight Returns" entwined
itself deeply throughout every subsequent metastasis of the character in
non-comics media, from Tim Burton's 1989 film to Paul Dini and Bruce Timm's
1992-1995 "Batman: The Animated Series" and its spin-offs to the more
recent Christopher Nolan cycle. Smartly, director Jay Oliva and screenwriter
Bob Goodman understand this. If they play "Dark Knight" as straight
as, say, Sam Liu and Lauren Montgomery's DTV Batman: Year One, they risk
looking cliché.

So they zag in a few places where Miller's
now-canonical comics script zigged, toying with the iconography. At times, this
works. In fact, many points where the script allows Miller's original tableaux
to stand are among the weakest. In the tempestuous memories of the aging Bruce
Wayne (Peter Weller), a very recognizable string of pearls snapped by gunfire
now patters into a pool of rain, vanishing like teardrops. Seeking rejuvenation,
a battered Batman imagines his boyhood mourning, confronting his costumed self
lying in state in his murdered father's coffin. Yet the filmmakers aren't quite
as willing to pull out all the stops as the source author was, and so they
underestimate the psychodrama of the tale. Miller's portentous thought balloons
aren't translated into voiceover--"Dark Knight" really did mark some
of his finest pure prose--but that would be a tall order, and badassery, not
complexity, appears to be Oliva's brief. Rather than embrace pathetic adversary
Harvey "Two-Face" Dent (Wade Williams) in recognition of their
symbiosis, this Batman cracks wise. The movie softens a confrontation where
Miller's Batman straight-up gunned down a Mutant to save a kidnapped toddler. That
Dark Knight had grown truly dark; here, it's a Marshal Dillon disarming shot.
And so on.

By its context, the
action takes place not in the present day but in some alternate 1986.
There are no cell phones. A convenience store frequented by outgoing Gotham
Police Commissioner James Gordon (David Selby) offers single-issue copies of
Alan Moore's "Swamp Thing" and "V for Vendetta" on its
magazine rack. The seventy-year-old Gordon lectures his incoming replacement
Ellen Yindel (Maria Canals) about the ramifications of Pearl Harbor as if he
was there. The parents of aspiring Robin Carrie Kelly (Ariel Winter) are hippie
burnouts, reminiscing about their part in the '68 Democratic Convention riots.
This story comes off as though two decades and change haven't passed, so Miller's
deft social and media satire, when it's honoured, is past its expiration date.
It's disorienting, since we expect the retired Batman to be either a future
incarnation or a 2012 model. It's like a nostalgia trip for producer Timm and
the DC Universe creators, living in a past when their beloved characters were
vital and revolutionary.

Oliva and Korean
animation house MOI excel at two things: the drifting, melancholic camerawork
adapted from high-end anime; and action. Oliva proved his mettle in
hand-to-hand combat scenes with the "Laira" segment of Green
Lantern: Emerald Knights last year, and at times in the story's exposition,
it's like he hungers to get to the beatdowns. The two set-pieces in which
Batman confronts the animalistic Mutant Leader (Gary Anthony Williams) are
wonderfully choreographed and quite brutal. (Trading blows in a riverside mire,
the two adversaries punch the mud right off each other.) In terms of
design, the characters drafted by Jon Suzuki and his team are faithful to
Miller's, within the constraints of the animation--the figures who looked huge
and imposing on the page are kind of thick on screen. What I mean to say
is: Batman's calves are hilarious. The voice acting, helmed by Andrea Romano, is
as airless and unconsolidated as a video game, as if afraid to misstep in
reading a modern classic aloud. Peter Weller has a grand way with a monotone,
but a monotone still only sounds a single note. This Batman barely raises his
voice above a murmur, and there's no change of inflection between the masked
hero and his alter ego. I'm not saying every Dark Knight has to gravel it up
like Christian Bale, just that a disguise should go beyond cloaks and cowls. At
least the casting, outside of Weller's role and Michael McKean (doing very well as a pompous psychiatrist), disregards DCU's recent penchant for star power in favour of practiced voice actors. That said, Selby's take on James Gordon
sounds a little doddering--a far cry from the interpretation by "Animated
Series" performer Bob Hastings, who made the Commissioner an energetic,
authoritative older man.

THE BLU-RAY DISC
Warner's 1.78:1, 1080p Blu-ray release of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1, with an accompanying DVD and an
on-demand Digital Copy, offers a visually fine presentation of a cartoon that
was, after all, designed for the medium. The dominant picture element is
chiaroscuro. Batman is a dark character against dark backgrounds, here using
the shadows as an ally in a way the Nolan movies don't seem to understand. This
Batman doesn't appear from out of frame, he lunges from dark doorways and black
corners, a grey-blue bulk melting dramatically into view. But nothing gets lost
in the night--the deep blacks never overpower and serve the film well, as do
the gauzy filters applied to figures and settings in daylight scenes. In-house composer Christopher Drake again submits a fine score, given wide range to
play in the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 sound-spread. His many subtleties live in
the rear channels alongside the atmospherics, pulsing alongside street noise. The film sounds fully dimensional, and if Drake's music is
a little more Escape From
New York than usual, that's in keeping with the
apocalyptic cityscape of a Batman-less Gotham. (If it apes the foreboding chug of
the Zimmer/Howard Dark Knight
scores, well, that's probably marketing.)

Unlike prior DCU
releases, there is no commentary track. The disc's nicest featurette is
"Batman and Me: A Devotion To Destiny" (38 mins., HD), a sensitive
look at Batman creator Bob Kane that's newsreel-influenced and probably long
overdue. The self-mythologizing artist fared better than most early-generation
creators in his relationship with DC Comics (in part because his father made
sure to have a lawyer read over his contracts and hold onto residuals), though it
wasn't without struggle. Biographer Tom Andrae traces the history of how
American Jews like Kane shaped the adventure pulp of the early 20th century,
flowing eagerly into one of the few creative media not closed to them. He also
pokes a few holes in the mystique of a man who claimed to have survived a youth
gang fight that crushed the knuckles of his drawing hand. "I'm not sure
that really happened," Andrae says. "I think part of Bob Kane's
autobiography is Bob Kane writing a movie script." (In that selfsame
script, Kane had a fling with Marilyn Monroe.) Stan Lee, who should know,
describes Kane as "a guy who's a little bit bigger than life." Two
1992 episodes of "Batman: The Animated Series" (22 mins. each, SD)
contain the origin story
of Two-Face. The image is soft and dated, and the DD 2.0 audio isn't mastered to the same quality as the
rest of the content, requiring you to turn up the volume by about 100 percent.
On the whole, the persistent inclusion of these old chestnuts on new Bat-discs only strengthens calls for a definitive Blu-ray set of the series.

The rest is
mostly glorified trailers. "Sneak Peek at Batman: The Dark Knight
Returns, Part 2" (7 min., HD) finds Oliva saying, "For the last twenty-five years, the fanbase has always been calling for an adaptation of 'The Dark
Knight Returns'." Yeah, well, I want a pony. Bruce Timm is here describing
the quest to "make this look more like Frank Miller's 'Dark Knight
Returns' than the comic does," which is an invitation for fanboys to tweet
"#EpicFail." Blurbs from voice actors of Part 2--Mark Valley as
Superman, Michael Emerson as the Joker--raise hopes for the second instalment, mostly based on amazement at Emerson's creepy laugh and Valley's
astonishingly Kryptonian chin. "A First Look at Superman/Batman: Public
Enemies" (8 mins., HD) is a trailer for a dtv film that came out in
2009. "Her Name Is Carrie...Her Role Is Robin" (12 mins., HD)
features Grant Morrison, producer Michael Uslan, and others nattering about the
significance of a female Robin, but I throw my hands up when academic Richard
Rader compares her to Antigone. Nice of Morrison to speak for fellow comics
scribe Miller, who apparently won't speak on behalf of himself or DC. There are
four pages of the "Dark Knight Returns" on board as a digital comic,
blow-uppable panel by panel and entirely shrug-worthy. Trailers for H+: The
Digital Series and DVD collections of five DC animated series load on
spinup. Also accessible from the main menu are trailers for the DCU comics
tablet application (available for every platform but my Kindle Fire),
"ThunderCats: Season One Book Two," The Dark Knight Rises, and
the remarkable-only-for-its-creative-bankruptcy "Before Watchmen"
comics series. The included DVD is shorn of everything but five trailers. Follow Jefferson Robbins on Twitter